5/28/2010 @ 1:00PM

Foxconn's Woes

New hires inevitably have paperwork to deal with when starting a job. At Foxconn Technology Group, new employees not only fill out all the usual forms, listing tax information and emergency contacts. They’ve also had to agree that they won’t blame their employer if they try to kill themselves.

Foxconn is the Chinese manufacturer that makes many of the products sold by
Apple
,
Dell
,
Hewlett-Packard
and all those other American household names that have long since given up actually making their own products. The company is one of the stars of the Chinese economic boom, owned by a flamboyant Taiwanese entrepreneur and employing hundreds of thousands of refugees from impoverished rural China in sprawling new factories in southern China that double as small cities.

Largely because of its connection with Apple, Foxconn is closely watched, and lately the news has seemed alarming. In recent months there have been a series of suicides by Foxconn employees. The American companies doing business with Foxconn have expressed concern and promised inquiries.

In response Foxconn’s owner, Terry Gou, has gone on the sort of PR offensive long-familiar to American companies in a bad spot. He hauled in busloads of journalists to give tours of his factories to show the world they aren’t “sweatshops.”

“I believe we are definitely not a sweatshop,” Gou told the Wall Street Journal. “It is very difficult to manage a manufacturing team of more than 800,000 people. There are many things to do every day. But we are confident we will be able to stabilize the situation very soon.”

By all appearances Gou is right. His factories seem safe, well-designed and free from the sorts of industrial horrors that most people associate with sweatshops. And whatever the dormitories that workers live in may lack in privacy, they make up for with modern quarters, along with food, medical care and a modicum of recreational facilities. If one of Upton Sinclair’s meatpackers from The Jungle were to wake up at Foxconn, he would probably think he had gone to heaven.

But we need to revise our notion of what makes for a “sweatshop” to deal with the new realities of the 21st century. Just because workers’ arms and legs aren’t being hacked off doesn’t mean there is nothing to be concerned about.

Consider the creepy legalism of the indemnification form that, according to the website Shanghaiist, Foxconn had been demanding its workers sign. (The company stopped after the matter was exposed.)

A sample clause read: “In the event of non-accidental injuries (including suicide, self mutilation, etc.), I agree that the company has acted properly in accordance with relevant laws and regulations, and will not sue the company, bring excessive demands, take drastic actions that would damage the company’s reputation or cause trouble that would hurt normal operations.”

Journalists inside China have gotten jobs at Foxconn, and described the lives they lived. There were some obvious abuses, like mandatory unpaid overtime and a lack of proper breaks for meals.

But the real scandal of the plant seems inherent in its very existence. The facilities are new, and thus isolated from normal city or village life. The work is numbingly dull. Managers are interested in performance and push their underlings relentlessly. Wage rates are such that employees aren’t yet in the middle class, and thus can’t afford even the entry-level consumer electronics products they spend their days making. Absent strong trade unions or reformist political movements, the immediate prospects are dim for the sorts of “luxuries” long taken for granted in the West like, say, weekends.

Even without the suicides, a manufacturing plant in China is nothing any of us would wish on anyone we knew. We are dependent on these plants, though, for the gadgets we love so much. Foxconn workers no doubt would choose their current circumstances over the rural poverty they left behind. One day, we hope, both they and we will have more than those two choices.